“I rarely find someone, really anyone, who doesn’t know some part of this story – the idea of the lost man who can’t get home after the war… the woman at home with the suitors. Everyone can tell me some version of it, which is to say, it lives in them.” – Tess Taylor, poet, on Homer’s Odyssey

In April, BBC Culture polled experts around the world to nominate up to five fictional stories they felt had shaped mindsets or influenced history. We received answers from 108 authors, academics, journalists, critics and translators in 35 countries – their choices took in novels, poems, folk tales and dramas in 33 different languages, including Sumerian, K’iche and Ge’ez.

Homer’s Odyssey topped the list, followed by Uncle Tom’s Cabin – examples of the different ways in which respondents interpreted a ‘world-shaping story’, with the ancient epic having survived generations of retelling, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel was commended for being “the first widely-read political novel in the US”. Frankenstein, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Things Fall Apart rounded up the top five – which features two female authors (in all, women made up 23 of the top 100 authors).

The most popular authors of the top 100 stories were Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka, with three stories each. In among the recognised classics, there are a few texts less well-known globally: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which directly led to the introduction of new federal laws on food safety, and Toba Tek Singh by Saadat Hasan Manto, praised as “a classic short story that translates the trauma of Partition through the post-Partition exchange of lunatics across the India and Pakistan border”.

It’s not a definitive list. This is just a starting point, aiming to spark a conversation about why some stories endure; how they continue to resonate centuries and millennia after they were created. And why sharing those stories is a fundamental human impulse: one that can overcome division, inspire change, and even spark revolutions.

Top 100

The list was determined via ranked ballots and first placed into descending order by number of critic votes, then into descending order by total critic points, then alphabetically (for 73 to 100, the titles listed are tied).

BBC Culture’s Stories that Shaped the World series looks at epic poems, plays and novels from around the globe that have influenced history and changed mindsets. The poll of writers and critics, 100 Stories that Shaped the World, will be discussed at the Hay Festival in May and later broadcast on BBC World News.

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